Graymouth

Hey everyone we hope all is well at home! We awoke to more rain this morning... If there's ever a new blog post there's a good chance its raining because we always seem to retreat to the nearest library at the slightest hint of precipitation. We've been on the south island now for about a week and this is how its turned out. Day one we woke up an hour late in martinborough so we had to rush to try to make our ferry time from the Nisland to the Sisland...which we didn't. Luckily we were able to transfer our time to 1 oclock for no additonal price. Once on the ferry, we met a few girls from the east coast and talked with them on the ride. We came to realize how sweet our van deal was, and how great our trip had been just by talking to them. We've been very blessed and lucky with places we've been, people we've met and of course the waves we've scored. Once in picton, where the ferry drops us off, we flipped a coin to see if we should head to the east coast to dive or to the west to surf. It landed on surf but we decided to dive... Why did we go through the effort? After going by a dive shop and dropping 250 on a spear for wiley, a mask for me and a snorkel for taylor, we were on our way to robinhood bay, which would end up being the worst mistake ever!
We made it to our destination with an hour of sun left and rushed out for a dive. The bay itself was beautiful and secluded and looked very promising for a few days stay. After pulling out a few pawa and some muscles we set up to cook and leave. Thats when we noticed our driverside tire was extremely low. In most situations this wouldn't be much of a problem but of course we didn't have a spare tire. There was one house in the bay so we drove up to it and asked the man there if he had a pump we could use, to which he replied yes and our hopes sored. We tried to inflate it for 10 minutes and gave up. The man then offered for us to stay in the old farm house next door and we said we'd love to and thanks.
After cooking our diner and setting up camp inside, we began to notice how creepy the house was. There were blood drops on the ground in one of the rooms, curtains covering all the windows, doors with handles only on the outside and broken window panes, creepy detective magazines everywhere, and sounds of doors opening and closing! Not to mention it was howling wind outside and we were in the middle of NOWHERE!!!!!! All this combined with our little horror story jokes completely scared the crap out of us and we completely thought we were going to be the headlines of the next mornings news. It was a full on scooby doo storyline where we magically get a flat tire and a farmer offers for us to stay in his abandoned house, hmmmmm.... We basically ran out of the house with our stuff and grabbed our tent and headed for the beach. After setting up camp far far away from the house we felt safe and were out till morning. We headed back in the morning and cleaned up all our other stuff and put it all back in the van. The owner came out and we started talking. Thats when he told us...Apparentally a woman had died in the house a while back and her ghost still haunted the place! REALLY??? WOW thanks for telling us now!!! That answered all our fears and we laughed at ourselves. The man and his family ended up being very nice and took us to town to get a spare and everything.
We were off and on our way to the west coast with our new tire and were about an hour and a half out of blemington when we noticed the tire going low again... We were all so bummed and headed back to fix the problem. Turns out it was just the little nosel thing that puts air in the tire so we fixed it and left. Once in westport, we began cooking dinner on the beach and were getting all ready for bed when we heard an echoing siren from in town. Of course this scared thacrap out of us and on top of our already suspicious day, we thought someone was out to get us so our creative minds got the better of us. the first thing we thought was TIDAL WAVE!!!!!! we threw everything in the car and rushed to higher ground where we found out it was a brush fire siren. Talk about a great day huh?
The last few days we've been in Graymouth and have gotten some great waves. We made friends with the branch president on sunday at church and were invited for dinner and stay at their house. Their family radiated love and brightened our spirits. We also got to go out with the missionaries here and learned a ton about the missionary work on the south island. truely an experience. We're now on our way south for some fishing and hiking into secret spots that we don't even know about. Cheers!